Free Stand by Me by Sheila O'Flanagan

her reflection, she realised that she wasn’t breathing. She opened her mouth and tried to suck in some air, but she couldn’t. She could feel herself starting to tremble and she tried to steady herself by resting her hands on her narrow dressing table. But she couldn’t feel her hands and she couldn’t feel the dressing table and she still couldn’t breathe.
     
     
    It was Evelyn who ran up the stairs to Dominique’s room when she heard the loud thud and the clatter of falling objects, so it was Evelyn who Dominique saw when she opened her eyes.
     
    ‘What happened?’ she asked.
     
    ‘You tell me.’ Evelyn looked at her with concern. ‘Did you fall? Bang your head?’
     
    And then it all came back to Dominique and she remembered that she was pregnant and that she was going to tell Brendan that night but she hadn’t been able to breathe and that was why she’d fainted. And she knew that even if she could breathe, she wouldn’t have much time for it, because if she told her mother she was pregnant, Evelyn would kill her.
     
    But she didn’t need to tell her. Suddenly Evelyn stared at her with knowledge dawning in her eyes.
     
    ‘Is there something I need to know?’ she demanded.
     
    ‘Like what?’ Dominique could only mumble as she struggled to her feet and then sank into the old armchair that had been donated to her room a few years earlier.
     
    ‘You know what,’ said Evelyn.
     
    Dominique said nothing.
     
    ‘I’ll get you some water.’ The concern had gone out of Evelyn’s voice, replaced by an undercurrent of hardness. She left the bedroom and returned a few seconds later with a glass of water. Dominique sipped it slowly.
     
    ‘So?’ Evelyn stared at her.
     
    ‘Leave me alone,’ said Dominique.
     
    ‘You collapsed in your bedroom,’ said her mother, ‘and I want to know why.’
     
    ‘You’ve guessed why.’
     
    ‘Tell me.’
     
    ‘What do you want me to say?’
     
    ‘I want you to tell me if there’s something wrong with you.’
     
    ‘Depends on what you mean by wrong,’ said Dominique.
     
    She knew she was playing for time. Not wanting to have to say it out loud. The thing was, being pregnant and unmarried wasn’t the absolutely major deal it had been ten years earlier, when Dominique remembered Sandra Sheehan, from three doors down, being sent away somewhere to have her baby in secret. She had heard the whispered conversations about Sandra, a pretty teenager who’d babysat her occasionally when she was smaller. All she’d known then was that Sandra was ‘in trouble’. She had assumed that ‘in trouble’ meant the same to Sandra as it did to her - that she’d broken something or told a lie or been disobedient. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that she realised exactly what sort of trouble Sandra Sheehan had been in. She hadn’t seen Sandra since. She’d no idea where she was now. But she did know that her baby had been adopted.
     
    Yet only a few years after Sandra’s pregnancy, Minnie Carpenter, from the other end of the street, had - as Evelyn once said - flaunted her pregnancy and her single status and nobody had said a word. So it was OK now, wasn’t it, to be pregnant and not married? It wasn’t such a terrible thing. It wasn’t so awful.
     
    She swallowed hard and told Evelyn that she was expecting a baby. And her mother slapped her across the face.
     
    ‘I warned you!’ Evelyn’s face was white with fury. ‘You stupid, ungrateful, sinful girl. I warned you!’
     
    Dominique opened her mouth but didn’t get the chance to say anything.
     
    ‘You were brought up properly,’ Evelyn raged. ‘We taught you right from wrong. You were raised in a loving, Christian home with Christian values. And this is how you repay us. By dressing like a tramp and sleeping with the first boy you meet.’
     
    ‘It’s not about repaying you!’ Dominique found her voice again. ‘It’s about me, and how I want to live my life. And it’s about